The Assassin

Hatteras

Chapter 1

Hatteras

The Fishing Village

I grew up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They are a series of barrier islands that protect the state from the rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Cape Hatteras is one of the barrier islands but is known simply as Hatteras to its inhabitants. I was one of those inhabitants until I graduated from Cape Hatteras High School in 1967.

Hatteras is just South of Bodie Island. Bodie Island is another barrier island in the chain of barrier islands that protects the state. Bodie Island, in turn, is just across the Roanoke Sound from Roanoke Island. It was there that Virginia Dare was born in 1587. She was the first English child born in America. And so Hatteras became a part of Dare County.

Roanoke Island is certainly the best known of the barrier islands. It was there that one of the greatest mysteries in American history occurred.

English colonists settled on Roanoke Island but mysteriously disappeared. The only clues to their disappearance were found scratched on their fort. The single word: Croataon. And on a nearby tree only part of a word: Cro.

What did they mean? The colonists were gone, and despite several expeditions to find them, they remained lost in history. Never to be found. Their disappearance became the fodder of many different theories.

The missing colonists came to be known as "The Lost Colony." Historians were never able to determine what happened to them. They were just gone. Had they been captured and killed by hostile Indians? Or had they fled south to the friendlier confines of Hatteras to escape just such an attack? No one would ever know.

Their story is immortalized in the annual outdoor drama performed each summer in the small town of Manteo on Roanoke Island. The Lost Colony draws thousands of guests to its audiences each year. And even more mosquitoes.

Hatteras is just south of Roanoke Island. It was accessible only by boat until the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge was built across Oregon Inlet in 1963. Before the bridge was built, however, vehicles traveled to and from the mainland by a ferry that carried them across Oregon Inlet, which separated Hatteras from Bodie Island.

The inlet changed its course daily. The rough waters of the Atlantic were unpredictable. The ferries often spent a portion of the day aground on shoals that had not been there the day before. Sometimes it was the next day before they were floating again to continue their trip across the inlet.

Hatteras extends for sixty miles along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean on the East and the Pamlico Sound on the West. Its beaches are unsurpassed in their beauty. Pristine white sand seems to go on and on forever. The beach is idyllic in every sense.

There is now a two-lane paved road that extends through the center of the island from Oregon Inlet on the North to the tiny village of Hatteras on the South. The road didn't, however, always exist. Before the road was paved, the natives of Hatteras had to travel the length of the island by driving on the beach.

The danger of becoming stuck in the soft sand was always there if you made the drive at high tide. At high tide, you had to drive far enough away from the surf to avoid being swept into the Atlantic. A vehicle could easily become stuck in the soft sand. SUVs didn't yet exist, so the potential for getting stuck was great.

If the same drive was made at low tide, however, the drivers could stay close to the surf on sand that was as hard as that of the paved road that would later be built.